That we may obtain our religious liberty : Aboriginal ... · 5 See Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, David Philips, and Shurlee Swain, Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples

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"“That we may obtain our religious liberty…”: Aboriginal Women, Faith and Rights in EarlyTwentieth Century Victoria, Australia*"

Patricia GrimshawJournal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada, vol. 19, n° 2, 2008, p. 24-42.

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“That we may obtain our religious liberty…”:Aboriginal Women, Faith and Rights in EarlyTwentieth Century Victoria, Australia*

PATRICIA GRIMSHAW

AbstractThe paper, focused on a few years at the end of the First World War, exploresthe request of a group of Aborigines in the Australian state of Victoria for free-dom of religion. Given that the colony and now state of Victoria had been astronghold of liberalism, the need for Indigenous Victorians to petition for theremoval of outside restrictions on their religious beliefs or practices mightseem surprising indeed. But with a Pentecostal revival in train on the missionstations to which many Aborigines were confined, members of the governmentagency, the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, preferred the decorumof mainstream Protestant church services to potentially unsettling expressionsof charismatic and experiential spirituality. The circumstances surrounding therevivalists’ resistance to the restriction of Aboriginal Christians’ choice of reli-gious expression offer insight into the intersections of faith and gender withinthe historically created relations of power in this colonial site. Though therevival was extinguished, it stood as a notable instance of Indigenous Victorianwomen deploying the language of Christian human rights to assert the claimsto just treatment and social justice that would characterize later successfulIndigenous activism.

RésuméCet article explore la demande de liberté de culte, à la fin de la PremièreGuerre mondiale, présentée par un groupe d’Aborigènes de l’État australien deVictoria. Sachant que la colonie (et désormais l’État) de Victoria était un bas-tion du libéralisme, il peut paraître surprenant que les Aborigènes aient sentile besoin de présenter une pétition visant à lever des contraintes extérieures

* I thank Fiona Davis for research assistance for this article, and for their helpful comments,Joanna Cruickshank, Claire McLisky, Andrew May, and participants in the session on gender,faith, and colonialism at the Canadian Historical Association conference held in Vancouver inJune 2008, especially Peggy Brock and Adele Perry.

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New Series, Vol. 19, issue 2/Nouvelle Série, Vol. 19, numéro 2

imposées sur leurs croyances ou pratiques religieuses. Pourtant, dans la mou-vance du renouveau pentecôtiste dans les missions auxquelles nombred’Aborigènes étaient confinés, les représentants du gouvernement, notammentdu Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, préféraient le décorum du culteprotestant dominant aux manifestations potentiellement dérangeantes de laspiritualité charismatique et expérientielle des Aborigènes. L’analyse des cir-constances entourant la résistance exprimée par les adeptes du renouveaureligieux quant aux restrictions imposées aux revendications de libertéreligieuse des chrétiens aborigènes ouvre une fenêtre sur l’intersection entre lafoi et le statut social des hommes et des femmes dans le cadre des relations depouvoir historiques créées dans cette société coloniale. Si le renouveaureligieux s’est finalement estompé, il n’en demeure pas moins un exemple mar-quant d’Aborigènes victoriennes ayant recours à la terminologie chrétiennedes droits de la personne pour revendiquer un traitement équitable et une jus-tice sociale qui allaient subséquemment caractériser un activisme indigèneréussi.

On 19 August 1917, a Victorian Aboriginal woman, Mrs. Mary McRae,wrote a letter with her husband Alex McRae to a woman whom she

addressed as “My dearest Mrs Bon.” Mary McRae was living on the govern-ment Aboriginal Reserve of Coranderrk, some 65 kilometres northeast of thecity of Melbourne. Mrs. Ann Bon was a well known humanitarian, a Scottishborn pastoralist’s widow, who had for decades served as an advocate forVictorian Aborigines and currently held an appointment as the first woman onthe Board for the Protection of the Aborigines (BPA).1 Mary McRae had a veryspecial request, namely, that Ann Bon might intervene with the state authoritiesabout a matter of concern to many in her community. “I would kindly ask ofyour help on behalf of Aborigines … that we may obtain our religious libertyby holding religious meetings in our cottages.”2 Mary McRae’s request forfreedom of religion in a state that had been a stronghold of liberalism, and in ayear that Victorian Aboriginal men were serving in a war on behalf of the

1 Joan Gillison, “Bon, Ann Fraser (1838–1936),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 7,(Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005), 338–9; Patricia Grimshaw, “Ann Bon,” inThe Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, eds., Elizabeth Ewan, Sue Innes, SianReynolds, and Rose Pipes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 40. Bon also usedthe spelling “Anne.”

2 Elizabeth Nelson, Sandra Smith, and Patricia Grimshaw, eds., Letters from Aboriginal Womenof Victoria, 1867–1926, (Melbourne: Melbourne University History Monograph Series, 2002),232. The archival records used in this article are held in the Victorian Public Record Office(hereafter PROV), the National AustralianArchives (Victorian Branch) (hereafter NAAV), andthe State Library of Victoria (hereafter SLV). Selected material in these archives has been tran-scribed and published in the above limited edition collection.

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“THATWE MAY OBTAIN OUR RELIGIOUS LIBERTY...”: ABORIGINALWOMEN,FAITH AND RIGHTS IN EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURYVICTORIA, AUSTRALIA

Mother Country, might seem surprising indeed. The circumstances surroundingthe letter writers’ resistance to the restriction of Aboriginal Christians’ choiceof religious expression offer insight into the intersections of faith and genderwithin the historically created relations of power in this colonial site.3

From 1851, when Victoria separated from New South Wales to form theseparate Colony of Victoria, missionaries and their supporters in governmenthad pursued the fraught goals of humanitarianism. Aborigines were affordedprotection from further depredations after the initial settler onslaught on theirland and lives, and minimal material support on reserves allocated by the gov-ernment. There, humanitarians expected them to abandon their traditionalreligious understandings for the Christian faith, and embrace western educationand ways of living. Amid this distressing situation, many Aborigines acceptedthe new faith, and entered into a novel outreach that included brokering com-munications across the boundaries of the settler and indigenous communities.Women of the new churches, better positioned perhaps than indigenous men toresist authoritarian control, were in the forefront of expressing dissent frommany colonial government pressures.4

Historians have noted that indigenous spokespeople for indigenous civiland political rights in Britain’s colonies and white dominions were most ofteneducated in mission schools.5 This paper focuses on certain Aboriginalwomen’s assertion of the right to religious freedom during and just after WorldWar I. Maud Mullett, Mary McRae, and her sister-in-law Lizzie McRae wereas children educated on the Reverend Friedrich Hagenauer’s Moravian missionof Ramahyuck. They were married to indigenous men, were in their late twen-ties or early thirties, and were attracted to Pentecostalism that had taken root inMelbourne in 1908. They and their families sustained close connections withtheir communities on the missions and reserves, but all lived for periods of timeindependent of this restrictive management. The archival record that affords

3 I have previously explored the lives of Victorian Aboriginal women in Patricia Grimshaw,“Colonising Motherhood: Evangelical Social Reformers and Koorie Women in Victoria,Australia, 1880s to the Early 1900s,” Women’s History Review, 8, no. 2 (1999): 329–46;Patricia Grimshaw and Elizabeth Nelson, “Empire, ‘the Civilising Mission’ and IndigenousChristian Women in Colonial Victoria,” Australian Feminist Studies, 16, no. 36 (2001):295–309; Patricia Grimshaw, “Federation as a Turning Point inAustralian History,” AustralianHistorical Studies, special edition, “Challenging Histories,” no. 118 (2002): 25–41.

4 See Diane Barwick, “And the Lubras are Ladies Now,” inWomen’s Role in Aboriginal Society,ed., Fay Gale (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1974), 50–63; JanCritchett, Untold Stories: Memories and Lives of Victorian Kooris (Melbourne: MelbourneUniversity Press, 1998); Isobel White, Diane Barwick, and Betty Meehan, eds., Fighters andSingers: The Lives of Some Australian Aboriginal Women (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1985).

5 See Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, David Philips, and Shurlee Swain, Equal Subjects,Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples in Britain’s Settler Colonies, 1830–1910 (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 2003).

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entry to their experiences is tantalizingly fragmentary, consisting principally ofa few letters that these indigenous Christian women wrote to colonial officials,together with brief responses from bureaucrats and managers to the women orto each other. The letters indicate the women’s efforts to uphold their entitle-ment to certain rights derived from their faith in the face of restrictions on theirautonomy resulting from legislation dating back to the 1860s. This paper beginsby tracing the history of the missions and reserves through which the colonialgovernment continued to regulate Aboriginal lives into the twentieth century,and their exclusion from political citizenship that inevitably provided a prob-lematic context for the assertion of human rights. It then considers the availabledetails about the Pentecostal revival, and the circumstances of the women’sfamilies, leading to consideration of the women’s appeal to their faith indefence of religious liberty.

Mission stations and compromised rights

As in other areas, two factors loom large in an understanding of the level ofcontrol that the government in Victoria and its bureaucracy exercised overindigenous Victorians’ choice of religious expression. First, in Victoria, as inthe previous settlement of the continent, the British government and subsequentsettler governments did not recognize Aborigines’ right to land. Once consid-ered recipients of charity if they wanted living space, Aborigines wereexpected, in exchange for assistance, to conform to the regulations of a grudg-ing state, an oppressive context for practising a new religion. A ChristianAborigine from a mission just north of the Murray River described Aborigines’plight in 1888. Although the land rightly belonged to the natives, he wrote inan “Appeal,” the white settler took possession of it all:

[Aboriginal people] have no call to it now the settlers [have] established them-selves all over the country, and take possession of it all, and unmercifullypunish the natives by means of powder and shot; but upon this questionnational economy — that is, the purse — pleads, in excuse of violence, civi-lization, and the advancement of the Christian religion; but for all this theheathens lose and the Christians gain.6

Second, the victors in the context of land, the white settlers, nourished a deepracism that deflected the efforts of indigenous Christians to make a life, theexplicit promise of the civilizing mission, free of the restrictions of the reserves.Guilt at the recent atrocities inflicted on the indigenous people was visited onthe surviving victims.

6 Fred Scales, “Appeal on Behalf of the Blacks of Queensland,” cited in Fourteenth Report ofthe Maloga Mission, ed., Daniel Matthews (London: Woodford, Fawcett & Co., 1890). I owethis reference to Claire McLisky.

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The government reserve at Coranderrk, from which Mary McRae wrote toAnn Bon, was one of the reserves on which from the 1860s Aboriginal peoplewere permitted to live in order to receive state support. The men that the Britishgovernment appointed in the 1840s as Protectors of Aborigines in the districtthat became Victoria had been singularly ineffectual in the face of a vicious landgrab that had characterized previously settled areas of Australia.7 SurvivingAborigines were deprived of their customary livelihoods and severely impov-erished, prompting humanitarians to voice concerns about their plight. With theVictorian indigenous population reduced from 6,000 or 7,000 in 1836 to a fewhundred in 1858, a Select Committee of the Victorian parliament recommendedthat “a vigorous effort should be made to repair the great wrongs done to theAborigines in the past.”8 In two pieces of legislation in 1860 and 1869, the gov-ernment allocated land for missions and instituted a body, the BPA, to overseethe running of Anglican settlements at Lake Condah and Lake Tyers, thePresbyterian-supported Moravians at Ebenezer and Ramahyuck, and the gov-ernment reserves of Coranderrk and Framlingham. Land remained Crownproperty. The government handed to missionaries and reserve managersresponsibility for the distribution of rations and clothing to residents, andapplauded endeavours to persuadeAborigines to accept Christianity, schooling,and Western ways of living.9

As a corollary of Aborigines’ acceptance — as settler governments saw it— of charity, the legislation instituted a considerable number of regulations that

7 For the early settlement of the colony of Victoria, see Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians:A History Since 1800 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2005); M.F. Christie, Aborigines in ColonialVictoria 1835–86 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1979); Jan Critchett, A ‘Distant Field ofMurder’: Western District Frontiers, 1834–1848 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press,1990); Margaret Kiddle,Men of Yesterday: A Social History of the Western District of Victoria,1834–1890, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1961).

8 “Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council to Inquire into the Condition of theNatives,” Victorian Parliamentary Papers, 1858–1859.

9 For Victorian missions, see Broome; Aldo Massola, Aboriginal Mission Stations in Victoria(Melbourne: The Hawthorn Press, 1970); Bain Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines(Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989); Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians: Black Responsesto White Dominance 1788–1994, 2nd ed. (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994); Jan Critchett, OurLand Till We Die: A History of Framlingham Aborigines (Warrnambool, Vic.: DeakinUniversity Press, 1992); Keith Cole, The Lake Condah Aboriginal Mission, (Bendigo, Vic.:Keith Cole Publications, 1984); Aldo Massola, Coranderrk: A History of the AboriginalStation (Kilmore, Vic.: Lowden Publishing, 1975); Diane Barwick, “Coranderrk andCumeroogunga: Pioneers and Policy,” in Opportunity and Response: Case Studies inEconomic Development, eds., T. Scarlett Epstein and David H. Penny (London: C. Hurst,1972), 10–68. Bain Attwood, et al., A Life Together, A Life Apart: A History of Relationsbetween Europeans and Aborigines (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994); DianeBarwick, “This Most Resolute Lady: A Biography Puzzle,” in Metaphors of Interpretation:Essays in Honour of W.E.H Stanner, eds. Diane Barwick, Marie Reay, and Jeremy Beckett(Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1985), 185–239.

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bore negatively upon the residents’ freedom of movement, personal autonomy,and control of their children. Missions and the state now were partners in pre-scribing the constraints that Aborigines had to accept in exchange for personalsecurity from assault and a meagre subsistence. While not all Aboriginesmoved to missions, those who maintained their independence could be requiredto do so if they were deemed vagrants. The mission stations were the onlyplaces where Aborigines could look for a secure means of living, shelter,clothes, and food. They had no land left under their own control, their usualmeans of living had gone with their land, and the alternative of camping, eat-ing “bush tucker,” and accepting sporadic wage labour was an uncertain basisfor feeding families. Learning about the missionaries’ Christ and learning toread and write came only with the decision to abandon personal independence.There were few signs that this fraught situation would diminish. The 1869 Actto Provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives ofVictoria gave the state further rights to control the movement of Aborigines andin certain circumstances assume guardianship of their children.10 Aborigineswho chose to live as fringe dwellers near country towns or mission residentswho challenged authorities were at particular risk.

The missionaries and reserve managers found quickly to their dismay thatAborigines adopted Christianity, became literate, and yet resisted the exerciseof church and state power. Missionaries presumed themselves to be engaged ina humanitarian endeavour, wished to be loved, and craved to be in good stand-ing in ecclesiastical circles. This position made them vulnerable, and theirChristian flock held some influence in a tussle of power that the missionariesmostly dominated but could not entirely control. Initially, missionaries sawhopeful progress in the school children; indeed, the school at Ramahyucktopped the colony in the annual inspection in 1879. A proud FriedrichHagenauer’s report to the BPA that year declared: “The work of training andeducating the young has been well carried on … and the best results can beexpected in future years, when these children grow up into men and women.”11But it was John Bulmer writing from the mission station at Lake Tyers whoearly on pinpointed a difference of perception between himself and his protégésthat would become a major source of tension. The mission dwellers, includingthose educated as children on the mission, quickly exerted their human rightsand clearly regarded the mission lands as their own in exchange for the hugeexpanse of land they had lost. “They do not think they ought to be under control.

10 John Chesterman and Brian Galligan, Citizens Without Rights: Aborigines and AustralianCitizenship (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 16.

11 Friedrich Hagenauer, “Report to the Central Board,” cited in Jenny Martin, “Issues of Genderand the Aboriginal Women of South Eastern Victoria: A Study of Two Mission Stations, LakeTyers and Lake Wellington 1860–1895,” (B.A. honours thesis, University of Melbourne,1990), 18.

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They take all that is given them as their due as we have got their country andthey get what is given as rent,” complained Bulmer. “All this makes it difficultto deal with them, and I must say that most of my troubles have come from thissource.”12 If the mission residents in increasing numbers worshipped in theChristian chapels, they nevertheless resisted the dominance that the missionar-ies regarded as proper demeanor and that the legislation fostered.

It was only a question of time before a new challenge arose to urge edu-cated Aborigines of mixed descent off the missions to seek a livelihood inmainstream settler society. Hagenauer was one of the missionaries whoseadvice fed into new legislation in the 1880s that had the intention of propellingeducated Christians into the white community. He asserted that there wereample Christian churches in the rural settlements, where their religious needswere amply met. A new Victorian government Act in 1886 declared that anyperson of mixed Aboriginal and European descent over the age of 15 and underthe age of 35 had forthwith to leave the missions. Adolescents of mixed descentwere apprenticed out or put into domestic service. The Board also utilized itspowers to remove any orphan, or child considered to be neglected, to an indus-trial school or orphanage. In 1899, an even more intrusive regulation enabledauthorities to remove any Aboriginal child from its parents if the governordeclared it was for “better” care and education.13 As missionaries aged or lefttheir posts, the government gradually replaced them with secular appointments,often ex-military men who nevertheless oversaw religious services. Governmentministers began moves to centralize the remaining Aborigines to fewer sitesand to rent or sell off the reserves to eager settler farmers.

Given the scarcity of employment available, and their lack of resources,the forced integration of mixed descent Aborigines into settler society was arecipe for disastrous poverty. Few had recognized white relatives. Manyresisted movement from land they saw as belonging to them and were unwill-ing to be separated from relatives, especially as there were restrictions even onvisiting the stations. What is more, Aborigines who continued on the stationsfaced increased pressure and struggled to prevent their own children from beingremoved in early adolescence to distant locations. The answer to getting theirfamilies off the mission while avoiding destitution was to assert a continuingentitlement to state support: they demanded land, houses, and transitional mate-rial support. Continual discouragement did not prevent Aborigines’ insistenceon this entitlement. In 1910, the poverty of Aborigines living off the missionwas such that the new legislation had to permit some people of mixed descentto return, with their assertion of the need for social justice undiminished.

12 Bulmer Papers, Museum of Victoria, cited in Martin, 24.13 Chesterman and Galligan, 25–6.

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The 1908 Adult Suffrage Act, which enfranchised women in Victoria withno exclusions, ought to have provided the political citizenship for indigenousVictorians that could have protected their civil rights. The settler governmentignored the fact that Aboriginal rights for Victorian men and women werealready severely compromised. In practice though not strictly in law, exclusionsof Aboriginies from political citizenship from the federal government had per-mitted in some states under the 1902 Commonwealth Franchise Act had flowedon to other states, despite Victoria’s own constitutions and laws.14 The debateabout the political rights of women, which reached a peak in the 1890s and firstdecade of the twentieth century as the colonies moved to federate, inevitablystimulated discussion of the rights of minority groups who could destabilizeprevailing regimes. While Victoria was home to a very small Aboriginal com-munity, it was not the case in the north and west of Australia, where settlerswere distinctly fearful at the challenge to white supremacy that political citizen-ship for Aborigines seemed to pose. In 1886 and 1893 respectively, Queenslandand Western Australia reduced the indigenous male eligibility to property hold-ers and used their political muscle to exclude Aborigines from the federalvote.15 In theAustralian Constitution that came into effect in January 1901, fed-eral political rights were declared identical with those already in existence inthe separate states.

The women’s vote and the indigenous vote were considered together on anation-wide basis in the 1902 Commonwealth Franchise Act, one of the firstmajor pieces of legislation of the new federal parliament. The new governmentinitially hoped to strike a uniform franchise including all Aborigines and allwomen, but found itself confronted with strident opposition. A WesternAustralian senator argued that the bill “would be all right for Tasmania, wherethere are no blacks, and probably all right for such states as New South Walesor Victoria; but to give the vote to most of the aboriginals in Western Australiawould be a very serious matter indeed.”16 In contrast the Victorian lower housemember for Southern Melbourne declared: “To draw a ‘colour line’ and say thatbecause a man’s face is black he therefore is not able to understand the princi-ples of civilisation, is misanthropic, inhumane and unchristian.”17 But, finally,

14 See ibid.; Patricia Grimshaw, “White Men’s Fears and White Women’s Hopes: The 1908Victorian Adult Suffrage Act,” Victorian Historical Journal, vol 79, no 2, November 2008,pp.185-209; Patricia Grimshaw, “Colonialism, Power and Women’s Political Citizenship inAustralia, 1894–1908,” in Suffrage, Gender and Citizenship: International Perspectives onParliamentary Reform, eds. Seija-Leena Nevala-Nurmi, Pirjo Markkola, and Irma Sulkunen(Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 34-55.

15 See Patricia Grimshaw, “White Women as ‘Nation Builders’: Gender, Colonialism and theFederal Vote,” in Selective Democracy: Race, Gender and the Australian Vote, eds. JohnChesterman and David Philips (Melbourne: Circa Press, 2003), 1–20.

16 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, vol. 10, 29 May 1902, 13003.17 Ibid., vol. 9, 10 April 1902, 11980.

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the racist views prevailed. The crucial clause read: “No aboriginal native ofAustralia, Asia, Africa or the islands of the Pacific, except New Zealand, shallbe entitled to have his name placed on the electoral roll, unless so entitled underSection 41 of the Constitution.”18 Section 41 of the Constitution enshrined fed-eral voting rights for those who had vote in the states, but was subsequentlyinterpreted to sustain the political rights only of Aborigines already on stateelectoral rolls on 1 January 1901.19 “Individual bureaucratic whim,” two ana-lysts say, “rather than legal consistency seems to have determined who wasbarred.”20 Victorian electoral officers used the state registration as a basis forthe federal roll. Because Aborigines might not, it appeared, be registered forfederal elections, officials generally believed that they also could not be enteredon the state roll, though some mixed descent Aborigines very possibly did reg-ister for state elections despite these uncertainties; overall indigenousVictorians were excluded and thus further disadvantaged in assertions of theircivil rights.

The advent of Pentecostalism

If Maud Mullett, Mary McRae, and Lizzie McRae persisted in claiming rightsduring the Pentecostal revival of 1916 to 1918, there were contextual circum-stances that assisted their capacity to take this stance. All three women hadreceived a basic education at the Ramahyuck mission school, and all had closekin who did not fit into stereotypes of passive mission residents.

In the case of Mrs. Maud Mullett, the first to bring Pentecostal influencesto Coranderrk, it was her mother who had attracted attention of the authori-ties through what was termed “defiant” behaviour. Maud was the eldestdaughter of Emily Wood Stephen, a spirited and talented woman who hadgrown up on the mission at Ramahyuck presided over by Hagenauer and hiswife Louise. As a child Emily Wood was a prize student, became nurse to thechildren of one of Hagenauer’s married daughters who lived in Melbourne,and sustained a strongly affectionate if socially unequal, relationship with themissionaries.21 When in 1872 compulsory schooling was inaugurated inVictoria the mission school had been incorporated into the state system, andgovernment inspectors praised the school as among the highest performing in

18 See Chesterman and Galligan.19 See ibid.; Pat Stretton and Christine Finnimore, “Black Fellow Citizens: Aborigines and the

Commonwealth Franchise,” Australian Historical Studies 25, no. 101 (October 1993):521–35. The Commonwealth Parliament reinstated political rights for Aborigines in the south-eastern states at federal level in 1949, and for Queensland and Western Australia in 1962.

20 Stretton and Finnimore, 530.21 Battye Library, Perth, Le Souef Family Papers, Letters of Emily Stephen to Ellie Le Souef (nee

Hagenauer), 1890–1893.

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the colony.22 On Ramahyuck Emily married Harry Stephen, and bore 11 chil-dren. When the Education Department shut the school in 1901, the 40year-old mother took charge of the pupils for several years before Ramahyuckresidents were shifted gradually to the other Gippsland mission at Lake Tyers.

In 1904 Emily Stephen boldly left the mission, taking five of her children,to seek a livelihood through hop picking. Her freedom turned out to be dis-tressingly brief. Emily and 13 year-oldAlfred were diagnosed with tuberculosisand spent three months in hospital before she asked for permission to return. Atthis point she was presented with a list of demands as the price of beingaccepted, including the stipulation that she “comply with the Rules andRegulations of the Board and the station.” She was to accept without complaintthat Alfred might be sent anywhere for training, and five year old Blanchewould become the special protégé of the Manager.23

The following year the whole Stephen family agreed to shift to Lake Tyers.There, a series of letters in the mission archives reveal that Emily had not beencowered by her experience. An incident in 1911 illustrates. At Lake Tyers JohnBulmer and his wife Caroline, superseded as managers by governmentappointees, remained living on the site. In April 1911, Captain R. Howe, thenewly appointed superintendent, took up his pen to write to the Secretary of theBPA. He was in a mood to straighten affairs out at the station, especially sincehe considered the aging Bulmers were becoming a nuisance to his disciplinaryregime. Howe’s purpose on this day was to lodge a complaint about EmilyStephen. His tone was outraged: “I have the honor to report that the conduct ofEmily Stephen is detrimental to the good order & discipline of this station ….she practically defies me but in such a manner that I can only make a generalcomplaint, and she goes round all the blacks and the Bulmers telling them thatshe has the ‘Board’ on her side.”24 He recommended that she be immediatelyremoved from the station.

The substance of the dispute in which Captain Howe and Emily Stephenwere engaged, and for which he alleged her guilty of insubordination, centred

22 For Friedrich Hagenauer and other Moravian missionaries, see Felicity Jensz, “CollectingCultures for God: German Moravian Missionaries and the British Colony of Victoria,1848–1908” (Ph.D. diss., University of Melbourne, 2007); Robert Kenny, The Lamb Entersthe Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World (Carlton North, Vic.: Scribe, 2007);Philip Pepper, You are What You Make Yourself to Be: The Story of a Victorian AboriginalFamily, 1842–1980 (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1980); Massola, Aboriginal Mission Stations;Brian Dickey, ed., The Australian Dictionary of Evangelical Biography (Sydney: EvangelicalHistory Association, 1994).

23 Phillip Pepper and Teresa de Araugo, The Kurnai of Gippsland (Melbourne: Hyland House,1985), 236. Emily’s surname is spelled “Steven” in this book.

24 PROV, Victorian Public Record Series (hereafter VPRS) 1694, unit 7, Captain Howe to Mr.Ditchburn, Secretary, BPA, 3 April 1911. Lake Tyers had formally ceased to be a Church ofEngland mission in 1908, but remained of special interest to the church.

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on Emily’s refusal to have her daughter Blanche’s employment shifted from theBulmers to Captain Howe, whose wife wanted Blanche as a nurse girl for heryoung children. Captain Howe tried to exert his authority to order 11 year-oldBlanche’s relocation. Emily Stephen, however, argued that she already hadexperience of Mrs. Howe’s ways when Blanche had been employed previouslyin the Howe household; Emily viewed the tasks Mrs. Howe expected of herdaughter to be onerous. Emily was not slow to wield her pen in turn to put herside of the case to the Board. Mrs. Howe, she wrote in turn, was “too high andmighty & not fit for the position of matron of an Institution like this … she con-siders us slaves that we have to bow to her decision.” That very day Mrs. Howehad spoken to Blanche in a manner which indicated: “What I say is law & hasto be done & no two ways about it.” Mrs. Bulmer, on the other hand, was con-sistently kind and careful. She allowed Blanche time each day for reading andensured that the girl attended prayers and religious instruction; moreover, sheallowed Blanche to return home each day in time to go fishing on the river withher mother and paid her five shillings a week for her work.25

To Emily Stephen’s alarm, Captain Howe, beaten on the first round, nowhinted that Blanche would soon be old enough to be sent away to service else-where in Victoria. She was too young to leave her mother’s protection, Emilypleaded with the Board: “A young girl like her may get into bad company, onedoes not know whom they mix up with when out in service in the city.”26Blanche continued working in the Bulmers’ home. By August, however, theCaptain’s tolerance of Emily Stephen’s defiance reached breaking point. Heknew, he told the Board angrily, that Emily was working hard to have himrather than herself removed from the station, boasting that she would force theBoard to hold a public inquiry, claiming that she herself would have a say in itsmembers. “Emily keeps the whole station in a state of ferment & while sheremains here there will be no peace. She is clever in a criminal way & has amost insidious & plausible manner … which generally impresses & imposesupon anyone who does not know her thoroughly — that is what education hasdone for her.”27 If she were a white woman he would sue her.

This time Howe’s view triumphed. In October the BPA obtained from thegovernor an order-in-council to remove Emily Stephen from Lake Tyers, with-out her children, forcing her into confinement on the Western District mission

25 Ibid., Emily Stephen to Mr. Callaway, Vice-Chairman, BPA, 30 March 1911 and June 1911.For more detail on the history of Emily Stephen’s family, see Phillip Pepper and Teresa deAraugo, What Did Happen to the Aborigines of Victoria. Volume 1: The Kurnai of Gippsland(South Yarra, Vic.: Hyland House, 1985).

26 PROV, VPRS 1694, unit 7, Emily Stephen to Mr. Callaway, Vice-Chairman, BPA, 28 February1911.

27 Ibid., Captain Howe to Mr. Callaway, Vice-Chairman, BPA, 9 August 1911.

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station at Lake Condah. Captain Howe had his revenge. By December Emilysent a letter of a very different type to the Board, pleading to see her childrenfor Christmas:

Will you allow me to have my children…. I have never been parted from thembefore … That I might have my two youngest children (Gilbert & Blanche)with me that would be a happy time. Trusting that you will grant the aboverequest [,] I am Dear Sir yours obediently[,] Emily M. Stephen.28

Emily escaped from what became a three-year exile and was reunited with herchildren by declaring that the family would earn their way on the outside. Shewas often forced, however, to face the humiliation of writing to the Board, asfamily members were hit by unemployment, to request rations and clothing.29But her children learned from the example of a woman who over decades hadbeen a spirited campaigner for rights.

Five years later, in 1916, Emily’s eldest daughter, Maud, commenced thefuss over Pentecostalism at Coranderrk. The plea for religious liberty emanatedfromMaud’s conversion to Pentecostalism which had a small but dedicated fol-lowing surrounding the Good News Hall in North Melbourne, established in1907 by the charismatic Mrs. Sarah Jane Lancaster.30 Maud Stephen hadworked as a baby nurse in the Melbourne home of Ida Hartung, one of theHagenauers’ daughters, before her marriage to a Coranderrk labourer, DavidMullett. In November 1915, Maud’s husband enlisted for the war and, inFebruary 1916, proceeded overseas to Egypt.31 David Mullett and Maud hadbeen living in the inner city Melbourne suburb of Carlton with their four chil-dren, Charlotte, Nellie, Rita, and a small son. Sadly, the baby died two monthsafter David’s departure. A letter in 1916 from the manager of Coranderrk, Mr.C.A. Robarts, to the secretary of the BPA complained about Mrs. Maud Mullett,who was living in Carlton, a few kilometres from the Good News Hall. In MayMaud had been given permission to enter Coranderrk to bury the body of herbaby. In July she came again without permission and invited several Aboriginesto return to Melbourne with her to visit the Good News Hall. On 17 July,Robarts wrote again to the BPA saying that the previous day Maud once again

28 Ibid., Emily Stephen to Mr. Ditchburn, Secretary, BPA, 7 December 1911.29 Ibid., Emily Stephen to Captain Crawford, Manager, Lake Condah Mission, 10 September

1914.30 Barry Chant, Heart of Fire (Adelaide: Tabor, 1973); John Harris, One Blood: 200 Years of

Aboriginal Encounter with Christianity: A Story of Hope (Sydney: Albatross Books, 1990);Barry Chant, “The Spirit of Pentecost: Origins and Development of the Pentecostal Movementin Australia, 1870–1939” (Ph.D. diss., Macquarie University, 1999).

31 National Archives of Australia, Canberra (hereafter NAAC), Australian Imperial Force, BaseRecords Office, (hereafter AIF), Series no. B2455, First Australian Imperial Force PersonalDossier, 1914–1920, “David Mullett.”

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arrived and this time took a young boy, Willie Logan, away without the man-ager’s knowledge so that he could visit the Good News Hall with her.

The Manager was nervous as it was an unfortunate time for any further dis-turbance of discipline, because there were moves afoot to close the reserve andmove the remaining residents to Lake Tyers, in order that the land atCoranderrk could be apportioned for returned servicemen. The residents wereanxious, some were angry. Maud Mullett was a constant visitor to the Hall, hetold the Board, where he was informed that meetings “of a very excitingnature” were held:

Her influence over the natives at present is very undesirable, as she aggravatedthe present state of mind which is existing among the natives. After her depar-ture last night (Sunday) a meeting was again held in one of the cottages andthe screams and wails even heard at a great distance, when they are under thatspell, nothing can be done to silence the natives. I would therefore request thata letter be sent to Maud Mullett prohibiting her visiting the station.32

The Board did not reply. It was difficult territory on which to intrude, and therewere always a few humanitarians who were watching the stations carefully.

On 7 October, Robarts tried again. Maud Mullett and “a lady friend of thesame following as Miss Hetherington” had come to the station. He becameaware of their presence when “some of the natives were excited by the idea ofMrs Maud Mullett’s friend holding a religious meeting in one of the cottages. Isaw Maude [sic] Mullett & her friend and informed them that no religiousmeetings were allowed to be held in the cottages.”

Their visit was very disturbing[;] there was a feverishness on the station dur-ing the day and in the evening some of the natives gave way to shaking andshivering … In weeks past the religious atmosphere has been normal; and noelement should be permitted which will rouse the people. I would again askthat the permit to visit the station granted to Mrs Maud Mullett be with-drawn.33

The introduction of the name of Miss Hetherington brought a new compli-cation to the reserve manager and the BPA, as Sister Isabella Hetherington wasattached to the Melbourne Pentecostal group. An Irish-born nurse, she hadmigrated to Victoria in 1903 for health reasons and worked on arrival as a gov-erness. Hetherington nurtured, she later wrote, a deep desire “to go and succourothers,” especially the Australian Aborigines, of whose desperate circum-

32 Nelson, Smith, and Grimshaw, 230. For details on the unrest at Coranderrk, see DianeBarwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk (Canberra: Aboriginal History Inc, 1998).

33 Nelson, Smith, and Grimshaw, 230.

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stances she had heard when still in Ireland. She acted on this desire. First shelived with an indigenous group on the banks of the Murray River, before join-ing the faith based Australian (United) Aboriginal Mission. When a startlingoccurrence of speaking in tongues led to her expulsion, she commenced itiner-ant work again with her young adopted Aboriginal daughter Nellie. This workled her back to Victoria, to the Pentecostals in Melbourne and thence to theirmission house in rural Victoria at Bunyip. The Pentecostals, influenced byAmerican Pentecostalism, endorsed speaking in tongues, practised “dancing inthe Spirit” and the casting out of demons, claimed to see visions, and upheldthe power to prophesy, all highly unconventional for mainstream Protestants.Hetherington’s sympathetic biographer describes her as “A pleasant-faced,demure and extremely short-sighted woman with small, round glasses.” Shewas consistently devout, he writes, compassionate, generous, hard working,and willing to serve with all denominations.34

Not all the residents of Coranderrk appreciated the Pentecostal style ofworship and some grumbled at the disturbance it created. It was not this objec-tion, however, but a fear that religious enthusiasm would carry over to somebarely controllable political challenge that worried the manager. At this news ofshrieking, quaking, and quivering, Robarts got the permission he wanted tosuppress the Pentecostals. The BPA helped rid the manager of his problem,though couching their edict carefully to appear unrelated to religious choices:“With reference to the complaint that Mrs Maud Mullett and a lady friend vis-ited the station on Sunday last and caused the natives to become excited at theidea of holding a religious meeting, Mr Robarts is informed that in view of MrsMullett’s defiance of authority in removing Willie Logan, the permissiongranted her to visit the station has been withdrawn.”35 On 16 October, the newswas passed on to Maud Mullett from whom the authorities heard no more forthe time being.

Persisting with the issue of religious choice

The silencing of Maud Mullett was not, however, the end of the threat of dis-order flowing from the Pentecostals. There were other converts ready tobecome involved, including Mary McRae, backed up by her husbandAlex, whowere followers of the faith, together with Alex’s brother Henry McRae and hiswife Lizzie. Both women were born on Ramahyuck and had benefited from therelatively sound education the mission school provided. Lizzie’s ancestryincluded a grandmother, Nora Foster, who had been educated to an advancedlevel at a mission in Albury, Western Australia, conducted by Mrs. Anne

34 Barry Chant, “Hetherington, Isabella (c.1870–1946),” Australian Dictionary of Biography,Supplementary vol. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005), 176–7.

35 Nelson, Smith, and Grimshaw, 230.

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Camfield, and sent to Ramahyuck in her teens as a potential bride for one of theyoung Christian mission men.36 Her father had been saved as a young childfrom a massacre site in Rockhampton, Queensland, and then left forCoranderrk.37 Lizzie in her mature years worked as a nurse.38

Their husbands were educated at Coranderrk, but had experienced anunusual period of relative freedom in their earlier childhoods. Alex and Henrywere sons of the well known indigenous artist, Tommy McRae. Tommy McRaewas born around the year 1835 on his family’s land in northern Victoria, on thesouthern side of the River Murray. He had been witness to the pastoral invasionof the area, drawings of which, and of Aborigines’ traditional living, broughthim to the attention of sympathetic settlers, includingAnn Bon. He earned a liv-ing working on sheep stations and as a stockman. The BPA listed him in 1885with his wife Lily, their children, and his brother and brother’s wife at LakeMoodemere at Wahgunyah, where they fished, raised poultry and sold pen-and-ink drawings to tourists. Alex and Henry were born there, the latter in 1889.39Tommy had escaped government regulation until in the 1890s he suffered theblow of having four children removed from their riverbank home to the reserveat Coranderrk. Tommy McRae could not prevent his children’s removal andfought unsuccessfully to regain their custody. He died in 1901, the year Victoriabecame a state of the new Commonwealth of Australia.40

Tommy McRae’s sons, Alexander and Henry, grew to maturity on theCoranderrk Reserve and married sisters from Ramahyuck: Alexander wedMary Darby in the Coranderrk Church in December 1907, and Henry McRaewed Lizzie Hamilton in August two years later. Lizzie and Henry had severalchildren who died in childhood. Mary and Alex had eight children: JemimaEllen Lilian, Sydney Henry James, David Hetherington, Thomas AlbertWilliam, who survived to adulthood; and four who died at a young age: Isabel,Mary Angelene, Stewart Alexander, and Josephine May.41

Mary McRae’s letter to Ann Bon of 1917 on behalf of the Aborigines atCoranderrk took up the cause for the right of Aboriginal Christians to worship

36 See Patricia Grimshaw, “Faith, Missionary Life, and the Family,” in Gender and Empire, ed.Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series, OxfordUniversity Press, 2004), 260–80; Joanna Cruickshank, “‘To Exercise a Beneficial Influenceover a Man’: Marriage, Gender and the Native Institutions in Early Colonial Australia,” inEvangelists of Empire? Missionaries in Colonial History, eds. Amanda Barry, et al.,(Melbourne: Scholarship Research Centre, University of Melbourne, 2008), 115–24.

37 Percy Leason, The Last of the Victorian Aborigines, issued in connection with an Exhibitionof Portraits at the Athenaeum Gallery, Collins St., Melbourne, 1934, 16–17.

38 Critchett, Untold Stories, 76.39 Nelson, Smith, and Grimshaw, 324; and Leason.40 Andrew Sayers, “McRae, Tommy (c. 1835–1901),” Australian Dictionary of Biography,

Supplementary vol. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005), 256–7.41 See Nelson, Smith, and Grimshaw, 324; and Leason.

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as they wished. Her letter ran: “I would kindly ask of your help on behalf ofAborigines … that we may obtain our religious liberty by holding religiousmeetings in our cottages when Mr Robarts is not holding a meeting; for thescripture saith the Most High doth not dwell in temples made with hands for yeare the temples of the living God.” She continued: “We ask only for what isright in the sight of God.”42

When Ann Bon took up this appeal with the secretary of the BPA, Mr.William Ditchburn, he appeared already irritated by Bon’s proclivity to serve asan advocate for Aborigines. Ann Bon’s query met with a terse and unsympa-thetic explanation. He noted with apparent disapproval that Mary McRaewanted “greater freedom as regards prayer meetings” and had a general expla-nation for his negativism: She was “so obviously actuated by a ruling desire tomake mischief that no weight should be attached to her communication.”43Robarts followed up with a request that the McRaes be removed to Lake Tyers:“The station is kept somewhat in a state of ferment by her bad influence.”44

Mary McRae and her husband found themselves and their children sent toLake Tyers, but Mary continued regardless. Some Lake Tyers Christians com-plained to Ann Bon that since John Bulmer’s death in 1912 there had been fewservices held on the reserve. Ann Bon recommended to the Board that SisterHetherington should be invited to do so.45 A group of Aboriginal Christians atLake Tyers, including followers of their countryman Harry Connolly, who hadtaken services both at Coranderrk and Lake Tyers, were opposed, however, toPentecostalism. Some said the sister’s methods were too stimulating, so thatone woman as a consequence displayed “religious delusion and insane excite-ment.”46 Mary and the other Pentecostals nevertheless persevered. On 19August 1918, Mary wrote again to Ann Bon, letting her know that she andAlex“have our little meetings ourselves in front of our house as we have been pro-hibited from having [services] in the Church.” Mr. Ferguson, the manager, haddeclared that they could not hold services in the church as they would “have toget the Bishop’s permission”; Lake Tyers fell within the see of the Bishop ofGippsland. What did Anne Bon think of this situation?47 On 12 September1918, Mr. Parker, now Secretary of the BPA, wrote to Ferguson, manager atLake Tyers. Mrs. Bon had sent letters to the Honourable the Chief Secretary,within whose government ministry indigenous affairs fell. Parker was “of theopinion that such meetings should only be allowed if under proper supervisionof either a white — or competent black person … inquire whether there is any-

42 Nelson, Smith, and Grimshaw, 232.43 Ibid., 233.44 Ibid.45 Pepper and de Araugo, The Kurnai of Gippsland, 241.46 Ibid. The McRae surname was spelled “McCrae” in this book.47 Nelson, Smith, and Grimshaw, 235.

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one you can recommend.” Ferguson replied that he could not do so: the McRaefamily was a representative of Miss Hetherington who was indeed the cause oftrouble. “Who is to have charge of the Church of England at Lake Tyers — theBishop of Gippsland or Miss H and her representatives?” he asked angrily.“The position was a little better since Mary McRae joined the choir,” hereported.48 Ann Bon duly brought the matter to the attention of the Secretary ofthe Board, but Mary and Alex McRae and their fellow Christians received noconfirmation of their deeply held sense of rights.

This was not quite the end of the matter. In 1921, Mary’s sister-in-lawLizzie McRae and her husband Henry wrote to Mr. Heathershaw, the ChiefCommissioner of Police in Melbourne. Lizzie and Henry had been staying forseveral years with Sister Hetherington at the Pentecostal mission house atBunyip. They attempted to extract funding for their benefactor who, as a faithmissionary, would not solicit funds for herself. Hetherington, they reported, hadfor the past year provided a home for two Aboriginal girls who had run awayfrom a convent. A friend had spoken highly of Mr. Heathershaw and, indeed,the McRaes endorsed that opinion personally if he was, as they thought, thesame man who had come to Coranderrk “when the natives rose up against him[the manager, Mr. Robarts] and spoke against him to Mr. J Murray who wasthen Premier.”49 The police had come and removed the girls, but there had beenno need for police action. Miss Hetherington had looked after them, had “cared,loved and tendered them as her own child.” She was up in the early morninghours and worked late growing food for them.

Mary McRae then revealed her aim in writing the letter: a request that theBPA should pay Miss Hetherington her share of the government allotmentowed to the two girls.

We ask you is it fair to a Lady who gives up her whole life to God to care forothers[;] especially those of a despised and degraded race whom white men oftoday believe that God Cant [sic] save[;] and we do praise God as full bloodnatives of Victoria[;] my husband and I can say that through MissHetherington we have seen and been taught more about Jesus, than ever anyManager and his wife on the Aboriginal Reserves in this State or any othercould teach us[;] for the white man thinks a black person has no mind[.] Butpraise his name God is no respecter of persons[.] Again I ask is a Christianisedcountry to oppress the stranger in our native land who came from a far coun-try for His name’s sake in the gospel to teach us about the love of Jesus Christour redeemer who died to save mankind from sin[,] black as well as white[,]all nations in one[.]50

48 Ibid., 236.49 The Chief Commissioner of Police in 1921 was Sir John Gellibrand. Hearnshaw may have

been temporarily in charge.50 Nelson, Smith, and Grimshaw, 238.

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There was no further word of Pentecostal revivalism on the missions andreserves. It was back to the church building for worship, back to people —men,usually white — approved by the Board conducting the services, and there wasan end to public enthusiastic expressions of spirituality.

The indigenous movers and shakers of the revival continued with greateror lesser success to pursue the means of sustaining their freedom. David Mullettreturned at the end of the war, where he had served in France, to dispute hisexclusion from Coranderrk, now cleared to make way for returned soldiers; butnot Aboriginal soldiers.51 His returned serviceman’s record shows he upheldhis rights in the face of indifference or rejection.52 Late in 1919, doubtlessbecause of difficulties in gaining employment in the city, he, Maud, and theirfamily returned to Coranderrk. She was apparently in a chastened mood,Manager Robarts noted with satisfaction. Maud was now going regularly tomorning church services at the station and had joined the choir. Mary and AlexMcRae moved off the mission to live in Warrnambool where in 1920 MaryMcRae died tragically young leaving her many children, her health debilitatedfrom childbearing and poverty. Lizzie and Henry McRae continued to live forsome further time at the Bunyip mission house with Sister Hetherington, beforemoving to Warrnambool, where Lizzie died in 1936. Isabella Hetherington,blamed by the reserve managers as instigator of the revival, became a faith mis-sionary in the north of Australia, teaching an Aboriginal school, preaching,living in huts, still tilling the soil and making do, a Pentecostal to the end.

The sparks of the revival Hetherington helped ignite among these VictorianAborigines were extinguished. Just as this incident was not the first, neither wasit the last instance of indigenous Victorian women deploying the language ofChristian human rights to assert claims to just treatment and social justice. AfterWorldWar II, when another generation of VictorianAborigines fought with whiteAustralians, civil and political rights were extended to Aborigines and govern-ments returned small allotments of reserve land to their control. The rectificationby settler governments of past wrongs remains a work in progress in a year whenthe Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, presented a formal apology to the childrenforcibly removed from their families and all who suffered from this cruelty.

* * *

PATRICIA GRIMSHAW is a Professorial Research Fellow in the School ofHistorical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests haveincluded the history of colonialism and gender history, and she is currently

51 Albert Mullett, interview by Lou Bennett, “Missionary Voices,” <http.//www.abc.net.au/missionvoices.lake tyers/voices of lake tyers/default.htm>, (viewed 20 October 2008).

52 NAAC, AIF, Series no. B2455, First Australian Imperial Force Personal Dossier, 1914–1920,“David Mullett.”

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engaged on a history of missions in Australia. Her publications include Pathsof Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth Century Hawai’i (1989),the co-authored Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples in BritishSettler Colonies, 1830-1910 (2003) and the co-edited Collisions of Culturesand Identities: Settlers and Indigenous Peoples (2006) and Missionaries,Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Exchanges, (forthcoming 2010).

PATRICIA GRIMSHAW est Professorial Research Fellow (chercheuse uni-versitaire) à la School of Historical Studies de l’Université de Melbourne. Sesrecherches ont porté sur l’histoire du colonialisme et des rapports hommes-femmes, et elle s’attache actuellement à l’histoire des missions en Australie.Ses publications comprennent Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives inNineteenth Century Hawai’i (1989), Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights:Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830-1910 (en collaboration,2003) et, en codirection, Collisions of Cultures and Identities: Settlers andIndigenous Peoples (2006) ainsi que Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples andCultural Exchanges (à paraître en 2010).

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Documents

That we may obtain our religious liberty : Aboriginal ... · 5 See Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, David Philips, and Shurlee Swain, Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples